Through the Looking Glass

A chronicle of the absurd, in politics and life

Friday, September 02, 2005

The Interdictor
walked right out of an early Neal Stephenson novel, into a data center
in a building in the Central Business District of New Orleans, which,
for the past week, he's been running as a military camp, while setting
up a webcam and reporting on the devolution of the city around him
into chaos. Earlier in the week, I was one of the people wondering if
there wasn't some kind of psychotic aspect to the "Mad Max beyond
Superdome" tone of his reportage, but it seems he was just a day or so
ahead of the major media in reporting the chaos --- and, in
particular, the predatory armed bands which have since been widely
reported to be hindering rescue operations and preying on the weak.
For that reason, I'm less critical than a lot of lefty bloggers about
the diversion of the city police from rescue work to anti-looting. If
it were just looting we were talking about, that would be
wholly inappropriate. But if rescue workers are being fired on, that
must be dealt with.

And that will be the last kind thing I have to say about government
management of this situation. I got some momentary amusement from
watching Ted Koppel fillet the politically connected estate lawyer
that Dubya installed as the head of FEMA, but it did nothing for the
sick feeling in my gut.

I trust no one needs me for a list of ways to
contribute. But there is one which deserves a little more
publicity. Given the lack of shelter capacity, MoveOn.org has set up
a web site for people
with spare space to volunteer for putting up refugees. As I write,
they're advertising more than 20,000 beds volunteered, about the
same as the advertised capacity of the Astrodome --- but more than
double the number of people that actually fit.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

"I don't want to alarm anyone that New Orleans is filling
up like a bowl," Michael Brown, FEMA's director, said. "That isn't
happening."

According to all other sources, that is what happening, and if it
doesn't stop, then the water level in the city will rise until it
becomes the southernmost lakebed of Lake Pontchartrain. But I'm sure
he doesn't want to alarm people. One out of two ain't bad, right?

It looks like the Republicans have finally figured out what they mean
when they say they've got ethical standards that won't let them get
caught countenancing criminal activity in government.

Most of my readers will know by now about the Republican governor
of Kentucky granting
amnesty to essentially everyone in his own administration who was
being investigated in a corruption probe. What's getting less
attention is the case of Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Pentagon auditor
who blew
the whistle on sweetheart Iraq-war deals with Halliburton and has
finally been canned
because of it.

The trend in the '90s, under Clinton, was towards removal of the
burdensome regulations on the financial industry which were a legacy
of the Great Depression, thus allowing the industry to be more efficient.
And things are presumably even more efficient than that in the
rarefied air of the hedge fund sector, in which rich people hand their
money over to managers who handle it with little or no regulation at
all.

In that arena, investors have complete freedom to make their own
choices, without any nanny state regulators to interfere. After all,
they're investing their own funds, and of course they'll do so with
care. What are the odds that they'd give that money to managers whose fund
would go bad, or disappear, or fall off the face of the earth?

Coverage on Fox of [the "anti-protests" against Camp
Casey] has been no different than would have been spun by Dan Rather
or Peter Jennings (RIP). It seems that now that Fox has reached the
top, it has become complacent in the MSM hierarchy, and is jettisoning
the strategy that got it there. ...

Skipping over his specific complaints (like the description of the pro-Bush
"protestors" as pro-Bush), we come to this stirring call to action:

Now this is important! We as Conservatives have
come to depend on FoxNews as a source to provide balanced
reporting. This is simply no longer the case! We need to stop
indiscriminately watching Fox, and recommending Fox, and we need to
let Fox's sponsors know that they are losing their audience. The same
unbalanced market conditions that enabled the rise of FoxNews are
resurfacing!

Yes, these folks will find liberal bias in anything, no
matter how slanted towards their position already. Which means that
you can't defend, say, an article on "Intelligent Design" by saying
that the moonbats are still complaining it should have been nicer to
them. They'll always say that. It's their job.

Monday, August 29, 2005

A complete post, hopefully not the last, from the livejournal of someone trying to ride out the storm in New Orleans:

building next door collapsed. this may go soon wall missing big cracks. fun trip love you

No car, and by the time she tried to make arrangements to leave, everything was closed.

And now... There are things technology can help with. There are things that it can't.
And the storm has just started to go through...

Update: Most recent comments on the post indicate that she got out. Whew. But one of the critical levees keeping water out of the sub-sea-level city has failed; things could still get a whole lot worse.

Every so often, someone suggests on the net that our Iraq adventure is starting to turn out like Vietnam. They cite the persistent guerilla warfare, the propped-up local government with violent internal opposition, the evanescence of the battle lines, and so forth. But this kind of defeatist thinking obscures the many, many ways in which the two conflicts are different. As Larry Johnson points out:

... today the United States military cannot keep a
six mile stretch of highway open that runs from downtown Baghdad to
the International Airport. U.S. diplomatic personnel and many key
Iraqi Government officials live inside a security ghetto known
euphemistically as the Green Zone. Even during the bleakest days of
the war in South Vietnam, U.S. diplomats and soldiers could travel
freely around Saigon without fear of being killed in bomb blast or
kidnapped. We don't have that luxury in Baghdad.

Last week, the New York Times published a page 1 article by Kenneth
Chang on the creationists' latest antiscientific propaganda campaign,
the "Intelligent Design" movement. The article was criticized
allovertheweb
for letting the creationists ramble on at length before offering any
refutation, and generally putting their hackwork and propaganda on a
equal footing with over a century's worth of scientific investigation.

It's been asked whether the Times would give the same treatment to
other false controversies --- whether a holocaust denier, say, would
get similarly reverential treatment. And here in my very own comment
section, is
the
answer, posted by someone who identifies himself as, well, Kenneth
Chang, which I'll reproduce here with emphasis added on a few key points:

The reason we're writing about I.D. is because they have
already managed to get onto the national stage and influence education
policy around the country, and if you're writing about it, you have to
explain what it is. Similarly, if there were a holocaust denier who
was, say, running for mayor, then yes, we would write an article
describing his (or her) views followed by the appropriate
denunciations and perhaps a clarifying passage indicating there is no
historical dispute that the Holocaust occurred. It would have a
similar back-and-forth structure, and no one would come away with the
impression that the Times approved of holocaust denying simply because
that view was presented first. Rather, I would expect that most people
would appreciate that these views had been exposed and they could
easily judge for themselves how offensive they were.

Note the subtle shifting of the goalposts here. The Times has not
been accused of approving of "intelligent design"; it has
been accused of presenting the debate as legitimate when, in
fact, it is not. If you're writing about I.D., you have to explain
what it is, but you don't have to devote half your article to
a respectful rehash of their idiotic non-arguments. (Though I'm not sure Chang's article actually did say in plain English what "Intelligent Design" really, objectively is: charlatans trying to get religious teaching into the classroom by dressing it up as science, while ignoring all standards for scientific evidence and review. For the most part, it treats them as if they were real scientists with an unorthodox theory. And if you think it's inconceivable for the Times to use language that strong in cases where it demonstrably fits, I invite you to review the Times's coverage of David Duke's run for governor of Louisiana -- like the Nov. 10th, 1991 page 1 piece headlined "Duke: the ex-Nazi who would be governor").

But, never mind that. Let's just think about that holocaust denial
article for a minute, written in the same "back and forth" style as
Chang's "intelligent design" piece, and see how we'd all like it.
Starting at the top, Chang's
article
begins by explaining, at length, the argument of "leading design
theorist" Michael Behe that the complex of proteins involved in blood
clots could not have evolved. Which drove P.Z. Myers to ask

When Behe says, "if any one of the more than 20 proteins
involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient ... clots will not
form properly", why not point out right there, in that paragraph, that
[Prof. Russell] Doolittle says that "scientists had predicted that
more primitive animals such as fish would be missing certain
blood-clotting proteins", and that Behe was shown to be wrong?

Instead, the fourth through seventh paragraphs of the Times article
--- all on the front page, in my library's printed edition --- have
Behe's argument, and Doolittle's refutation doesn't start till the
fifteenth, for which the reader must turn to page 10. People who read only the grafs
on page 1, of whom there are many, could easily be left with
the impression that science had no specific refutation of Behe.

A similar treatment of a Holocaust denier would give a respectful
restatement of his views, then go on for several more paragraphs to
say, in general terms, that Jews find these sorts of views
objectionable, before finally explaining, starting in the fifteenth
graf, that we have pictures of mass graves and death camps, or that the once vibrant
Jewish communities of Germany and Poland had essentially vanished
after the war. It would put the denier on page 1 (along with a few
statements of general distaste for his position), and leave a
presentation of the evidence against him, for "balance", along with
plenty more "evidence" in favor, for the inside pages.

Who could have a problem with that? After all, a similarly
"balanced" treatment of Iraq WMD skeptics in the IAEA and foreign governments
before our invasion, or of the people within our ownmilitary raising doubts about
the administration's "cakewalk" postwar scenarios, would have been a marked
improvement over what we actually got.

Looking over that last paragraph, I can imagine someone from
the Times asking whether I want them to be more balanced or less. So to put my position in slightly plainer English: In each case here, the Times made a judgment about which views to present, and at what length. In each case, the friends of the present administration got more credit and respect than they deserved, and in each case, their opponents got less. That's the same bias both times, even if the result in one case was a piece which, measured crudely by word count, might appear superficially "balanced". The Times's coverage of the Duke campaign was largely free of this phony "balance", and better journalism for it.